Most search results are text documents. But reading text is a cognitive burden since this has to be done linearly. Visual representations of text enable users to scan textual information more quickly and effectively, and thus have been widely explored in presenting retrieved documents. One of the best known is TileBars [1]}, which allows users to simultaneously view the relative length of the retrieved documents, the relative frequency of the query terms, and their distributional properties with respect to the document and each other. As shown in Figure REF , retrieved documents are shown as rectangles, text segments as squares, the darkness of a square indicates the frequency of query terms in the segment, and the patterns in a column can be quickly scanned and deciphered, helping users in making relevance judgments about the documents.
Variations of TileBars is proposed by [2]}, [3]}.
A good survey of visualization in search interfaces is [4]}.
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